Agreement on reform of vocational training aims to upgrade skills levels

In March 2007, the Portuguese government and the social partners approved the agreement for the reform of vocational training. However, the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers did not sign the agreement, on the grounds that the commitments and guarantees it included were insufficient. The agreement defines strategic objectives as well as practical measures, introducing new tools and redesigning the institutional framework of vocational training.

On 14 March 2007, the government and the social partners represented in the Standing Commission for Social Concertation (Comissão Permanente de Concertação Social, CPCS) established the Agreement for the reform of vocational training (Acordo para a Reforma da Formação Profissional (in Portuguese, 90Kb PDF)). The agreement complements the commitments made in the bipartite Agreement regarding vocational training signed in February 2006 (PT0603019I).

Views of social partners

The General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores Portugueses, CGTP) was the only social partner organisation that did not approve the new agreement. For the first time, CGTP has not subscribed to an agreement on vocational training. The Secretary General of CGTP, Manuel Carvalho da Silva, argued that ‘the commitments for the implementation and the guarantees were insufficient’ and that CGTP refused ‘to institutionalise a “carrot and stick” policy in the country’.

Conversely, the General Workers Union (União Geral de Trabalhadores, UGT) believed that the agreement guaranteed the reinforcement of continuous training. The Secretary General of UGT, Joã o Proenç a, stated that ‘the agreement sets up the objective conditions to comply with the Labour Code and to provide the workers with the necessary tools in cases where companies do not comply with their duties.’

On the employers’ side, the President of the Portuguese Trade and Services Confederation (Confederação do Comércio e Serviços de Portugal, CCP), José António Silva, acknowledged that, despite the great investment in vocational training which has been made in the past, results were rather inadequate; in this context, he conceded that the new agreement constituted a major challenge. Meanwhile, the President of the Confederation of Portuguese Industry (Confederação da Indústria Portuguesa, CIP), Francisco van Zeller, considered that the agreement opened a new era for vocational training, defining clearly the responsibilities and the objectives to be pursued.

Aims of agreement

The Agreement for the reform of vocational training establishes a number of strategic objectives, namely to:

• generalise the secondary level of education and promote the development of occupational courses at secondary level;

• guarantee the certification of all occupational courses, in educational as well as in professional terms;

• offer a vocational training syllabus to meet companies’ modernisation requirements as well as to upgrade workers’ education and skills;

• reinforce the role of the system of recognition, validation and certification of competences;

• combat the informal economy as well as managerial practices which undermine the chances of workers’ gaining qualification;

• render effective the individual right to annual minimum hours of vocational training;

• upgrade management skills, providing training adapted to their particular needs;

• promote training on social dialogue, in order to strengthen collective bargaining.

Targets set out in agreement

Moreover, in addition to the above, the agreement sets a series of targets to be achieved between 2007 and 2010, namely to:

• guarantee that occupational courses at secondary educational level will represent 50% of the total education offered at this level, encompassing 650,000 young persons;

• upgrade the skills of one million workers by 2010, through the system of recognition, validation and certification of competences and through adult education and training;

• extend the network of the Centres of New Opportunities (Centros Novas Oportunidades) up to 500 teams by 2010 and include 2,175,000 adults in training modules;

• involve 35,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in consultancy and training programmes;

• enrol 565,000 persons into training programmes on management and innovation.

Practical measures

In line with those objectives, the social partners and the government agreed on a number of practical measures, such as the following:

• creation of a National Catalogue of Qualifications (Catálogo Nacional de Qualificações, CNQ), including occupational profiles and training guidelines;

• creation of an Individual Competences Notebook (Caderneta Individual de Competências) registering all the competences acquired over the life course;

• reform of the system of national certification through establishing a National System of Qualifications (Sistema Nacional de Qualificações, SNQ) and a system regulating access to occupations (Sistema de Regulação de Acesso a Profissões);

• creation of the ‘vocational training cheque’, a public tool for the direct funding of individual training needs, aimed at ensuring the right to individual vocational training.

Maria da Paz Campos Lima and Reinhard Naumann, Dinâmia